6 Tools That Are Important To Help Your Start-Up Succeed

Building a startup is hard. But succeeding at it, harder.

According to an IBM survey, 90% of startups fail in the opening 5 years of their operations in India alone.

This means to succeed you need more than a revolutionary plan.

You need a high-performance team to execute your plans the right way. The good news is you do not completely have to depend upon skilled human labor to do so.

With the rise of intelligent SaaS tools that support the startup ecosystem to achieve their goals, you can easily curate your best match.

This blog post dives deep into these high-performance tools to give you comprehensive knowledge on how you can use them. Let’s dive in.

6 essential tools to grow your start-up

Choosing the tools for your super toolkit takes a little more work than you think.

In times when the SaaS market is flooded with options that have almost the same or similar claims regarding features, performance, and pricing, choosing yours is tricky. But there is nothing that a little strategy can’t solve.

This means no matter how good a tool’s performance or reviews are on the internet, whether it makes it to your toolkit depends upon your unique real-time needs, constraints, and budget.

No matter whether you choose a free plan or a premium option, it is completely depending upon your startup needs.

The following are the tools that we have curated for your startup’s success in 2021.

1. Documentation tool

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The key to successful project collaboration is seamless communication and sharing amongst team members without any redundancy. This is why a documentation tool is so important.

Slite is a beast when it comes to this. Combining the power of project management and documentation, this tool ensures you have the best of all. It integrates advanced agile features like composer where you can create every content needed for your process. Be it your documentation guide or files everything is doable.

The best part? To streamline the process, even more, it has got in-built templates to choose from. The statement of work is one such template. Every important detail of your project, right from the budget, ideation, iteration, timelines, deliverables are mapped in this template. All you have to do is fill in the specifics. But if you are still unsure of how beneficial this tool may be for you here are a few of its benefits.

Pros:

• Good methodology for agile projects
• Comes with different templates to start with

Cons:

• The UI is a bit distorted at times

Price: It is a free tool to start with.

2. Marketing automation tool

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You can’t just sit and wait for clients to come looking for you. This makes marketing so critical for getting customers for any business. But the sad truth about the marketing landscape is that it is dynamic and complex. But marketing automation tools can change the face of your marketing forever. Adobe Marketo is one such tool.

With advanced lead segmentation and engagement features, you can personalize content, customer experiences and create more personalized sales journeys for your customers. The best part? It has the unique ability of sales partnerships and cross-channel engagement for your customers. This ensures that the tool can support your unique business needs.

Pros:  

• Extremely easy to use
• Capable of handling complex and customized interactions

Cons:

• Doesn’t have the best of user interface designs
• Its landing page is a delay in time

Price:  Marketo is relatively on the expensive end of marketing automation tools. The plan is divided into select, prime, ultimate, and expertise.

3. Productivity tool

Productivity has been one of the single most important metrics that has been impeding the growth of startups. This makes measuring and optimizing your billable time to ensure productivity is critical for success. Productivity tools come in handy here.

Friday is one powerful tool when it comes to productivity.

With powerful embedded features such as planner, to-do list, meeting scheduling, chrome extensions, and user permission, the software takes your daily goal accomplishment to the next level. A part of it is because of the powerful automation in-built in this tool. The best part?

All of this can be done remotely all from one place.

Pros: 

• Easily syncs with other apps like Outlook, Gmail, etc.
• Extremely easy to use

Cons:

You need to learn to handle multiple tasks.

Price: it comes with three plans, Free, Pro,  and Enterprise. Pro cost around USD 6 per month/person while the Enterprise version offers extra features, such as permission and API access

4. Employee engagement tool

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No matter how good your startup idea is if you fail to execute it, your startup is designed for failure. This means without a stellar team, all your startup dreams are dreams only. But the problem is keeping a team motivated at work is complex. This makes employee engagement tools so valuable. Groupe.io is a powerful tool to consider here.

With the mission to create a balance between life and work amongst employees, this tool enables you to track performance and behavior for each of your employees. What follows is custom-created programs for each employee based upon their behaviors.

Employees can give rewards to one another and communicate with each other. Rewards can be used to buy brand coupons. But that is not all. The tool extends its offers to tailored human resource optimization.

The Groupe team consists of experts in Human Resources, employee engagement, productivity, workplace well-being, surveys, as well as communicative and technology skills to strengthen your programs.

Pros:

• Allows sharing real-time updates, news of the company
• Creates a healthy and motivating team

Cons:

• Becomes difficult to work with the tool when a large number of users are using it

Price: The pricing of the tool is based on the demands and the features you will be charged.

5. Analytics tool

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Data is the oil for every startup. Without insight-rich actionable data understanding what your customers want is challenging to say the least. This makes analytics tools so valuable to startup processes.

Mixpanel is an analytics tool designed to help website owners and SaaS companies monitor, measure, and evaluate the success of a product or service.

Mixpanel is the only real-time analytics tool where you can use Mixpanel to create beautiful, real-time dashboards to analyze user activity. A dashboard shows the right information at the right time and gives you the ability to drill down into the data to answer questions you didn’t know you had.

It iis built from the ground up to be responsive, and fast. You can collect, analyze, and visualize data in a way that works wherever your users are: desktop, tablet, or mobile. Features include real-time data visualization, starring the user.

Build dashboards and reports from data you collect. Measure overall site activity, and track behavior across different parts of your app. Track custom events, in-app activity, and more.

Pros:

• Allows you to create different reports
• Allows you to visualize data in many different reports
• Simple and easy to set up and get started

Cons:

• The support system is slow
• Features are harder to discover

Price: Free is free, Growth costs you USD 25 per month and the last is the Enterprise version. This plan is customized based on your business growth.

6. Communication tool

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Communication can make or break your startup in the long run. Done right, it can create the most efficient workflows. But fail in it and your lives are going to be miserable. With your data and files running all over the place, redundancy in work will be the minimal hassle that you would face. This makes robust communications tools so important.

Microsoft Teams is one such software. Used in group chats, IMs, and calls you can integrate Microsoft Teams almost on any device. Be it a PC or a Mac, laptop, or mobile device.  What’s more? Microsoft Teams is available in 30 plus languages.

You can use it to plan team tasks, schedule meetings with clients and within the organization.  What makes it different from other communication tools is its channel ability. It allows users to create a channel and collaborate in standard, public, and open for all whoever wants to join the channel. With the use of a channel, you can discuss your errors, your achievements with the same mindsets.

Pros:

• Increase the productivity of a team
• Easy connectivity

Cons:

• Its structure is complex for non-technical users

Price: Free to use with the basic plan, for business it starts with 125 per month per user.

Conclusion

There you got the list of the top 6 tools that help you to succeed with your start-up. Each tool offers a unique capability and is useful for your business operations. From employee engagement to team collaboration, you got all the tools in hand.

But still, if you have to ensure that your toolkit is always high-performance, timely iteration in the toolkit is required. This means, knowing the performance of the tools from the perspective of your stakeholders: customers, employees, and collaborators will give you a true picture of how well they are working for you.

Chances are you would find a few tools exit while some new ones enter your space with time.

So now when you know the best tools to integrate into your system, it is action time. Go ahead and start your growth story today.

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